Command Line vs GUI

An important topic in interface design for end users that is rarely discussed is when to design an application for the command line and when to design it as a GUI. Most computer users have a strong opinion about this. Nontechnical people often seem to hold the belief that the GUI is simply more advanced technology and command line applications are an artifact of a primitive era, while some hardcore adherents to the philosophy of Unix believe that command line applications are superior. I believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle and each paradigm of UI design can be applied appropriately to different use cases. In this blog post, I will give an outline of things to consider when choosing between the two when designing or using an application.

Technical Literacy of the Users

First consider how technically literate your users are. Not everybody who uses a computer is necessarily a computer person and that’s perfectly ok. Technical literacy proceeds much like normal literacy. When people first learn to read, they tend to start off with picture books. The pictures in a picture book give context to what is going on with the story. When words are necessary, the context of the pictures can help the reader to understand words or concepts they are not familiar with. This is a bit like the icons of a GUI which can give some visual context to a command that might not be easy to understand with words alone.

As we learn to read, we tend to prefer novels. Words are capable of expressing certain subtleties that pictures alone cannot. Some complex processes are much better modeled with words than pictures. What we lose with the visual immediacy of the GUI is made up with a greater capacity for complexity. Anyone who has put together furniture with the picture-only instructions from Ikea might know what I mean (or is that just me?).

Takeaway: always use a GUI if your users are nontechnical.

Composability and Automation

The most obvious weakness of a GUI is that they are notoriously difficult to compose and automate. By compose I mean the ability to take the output of one program and use it as the input of another program. Command line applications can be combined and assembled into scripts that can accomplish a task automatically on certain events. This isn’t possible with GUIs because they require user interaction at runtime. Command line applications are like Lego blocks that can be assembled into whatever you need at the time and rearranged when your needs change.

This has a strong influence on the interface design in either paradigm. GUI applications need to have strong and well thought out opinions on how the user will use the application. They live alone at the end of a chain of automation so they must provide everything the user needs to accomplish their task. Thus GUI applications tend to have a much larger scope than command line applications making them more difficult to develop and maintain. This isn’t all bad though because highly opinionated software tends to be easier to use, given you use it for the purpose it is designed for.

Command line applications can be designed with a limited scope to accomplish a general task. This is in line with an important tenant of UNIX design philosophy:

Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”. – Doug McIlroy

This design approach is sometimes called “worse is better”. A design that has less features (“worse”) will be simpler to use and understand (“better”). Less opinionated software has the advantage of being more extensible, that is, able to be used for a purpose that the designers of the software did not anticipate.

Takeaway: prefer the command line when your application might be used as part of a larger workflow.

The Visualness of the Domain

The most obvious weakness of command line applications and text interfaces is that they are not capable of displaying raster or vector data (e.g., images or elevation data) in their most natural visual form. A full-featured web browser or image editor must always be written as a GUI.

In this situation, it’s often a good idea to provide both a command line interface and a GUI. For instance, when I’m doing image processing, I will start with GUI image editing software like Gimp and then when the task becomes more clear, I’ll switch to a command line image editing application like imagemagick which can be automated. Doing a simple task like resizing all the images in a directory is much easier to do on the command line than with a GUI image editor, but determining exactly what is the right size is easier in the GUI.

Takeaway: if your domain is visual, provide both a command line and a GUI application.

Documentation and Discoverability

GUI applications are known for being difficult to formally document. Instructions on how to do things are presented with screen shots often with little circles around the right places to click which the user must repeat themselves to get the right result. Following these instructions for especially complex tasks can start to feel like a scavenger hunt. Seemingly innocuous changes in the UI can cause the documentation to go out of date because the screenshots no longer reflect what the application looks like and updating all the screenshots is tedious. The reality is that documentation for GUIs is rarely helpful and therefore rarely used. Instead, users expect the interface itself to guide them towards their goal. GUIs are great at this because the flow of the application can be laid out visually in a way anyone can understand without reading anything.

This experience isn’t possible with a command line application. Reading (and therefore documentation) is simply required to use the software either by passing a --help flag or reading the installed manual page. However, command line applications can be documented much better because the documentation medium is the same as the command medium (text!). Often times, documentation can simply be evaluated directly by copying and pasting an example command directly from the manual page or your web browser. This makes command line applications easier to support through text based communication like email or instant messaging, because telling someone what to type is easier than telling them where to click when you can’t see their screen.

On a related note, GUIs are better at internationalization. Command line applications and their parameters are almost always in English which not everybody knows, while GUIs can provide an emersive environment in many different languages.

Takeaway: use a GUI if your users don’t like to read.

Portability

The greatest advantage of command line applications is you can run them on systems without a graphical environment. As long as you have a shell on the computer, such as with a remote shell protocol like SSH, you can run the command. This is invaluable when you need to run your application on a remote server or an embedded device. A GUI application can normally only run on a computer with a connected mouse, keyboard, and monitor. Remote desktop protocols exist, but they are heavy on resources and much less reliable than SSH. If your workflow primarily consists of command line applications, it’s possible to work seamlessly on many machines at once which is a big boost to productivity. This is the reason why I prefer to use a lightweight text editor like Vim instead of an IDE.

Takeaway: use the command line if you need to run on servers and embedded devices.

Conclusion

This all might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how often I see people choosing the wrong tool for the job. Using both command line applications and GUI applications are an essential part of being a computer power user and knowing when to use each one is an important skill for computer programmers who want to work as efficiently as possible.

2 thoughts on “Command Line vs GUI”

Nice article! I think it’s also interesting when applications start as just a CLI and then GUI(s) are later developed on top, so that the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the CLI may be designed with later GUI development in mind.